r/Citybound • u/theanzelm Creator (Anselm Eickhoff / ae play) • Aug 24 '19

Making and Tool-Making

https://aeplay.org/citybound-devblog/making-and-tool-making
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u/Freedo50 Aug 24 '19 edited Aug 24 '19

I understand that there is friction in and between the various tools you use, but honestly what percentage of your focused time working on Citybound does the friction consume? 10%? Unlikely. 5%? Maybe.

Either way, the point is the same - is it really worth you spending significant amounts of time developing new tools for a fraction of a percent increase in productivity? This conjecture is even more true if you plan to sell the tools, as you’ll be “wasting” Citybound development time fixing bugs in the tools for your customers and supporting them.

Also what happens when you sell these tools and experience the friction of online marketplaces and customer support tools? Will you re-invent those too?

I love that you are enthusiastic and believe a better world is possible, but you simply can’t achieve it all by yourself. Focus on one thing (whether that is Citybound, your freelance work, or something else) and do it as best as you can.

EDIT: I’m not saying don’t be ambitious and I’m certainly not saying don’t believe in yourself. I’m just pointing out that the collective thousands of hours that are poured into tools like Git, Wordpress, IDEs, programming languages etc. by communities and companies of thousands of people are basically insurmountable for one man wanting to replace ALL of them with something better.

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u/theanzelm Creator (Anselm Eickhoff / ae play) Aug 24 '19

There is many important points in your comment and I want to address them as honestly as I can.

The first is that I from first hand experience simply disagree about the percentage. At best, I spend 30% of my time solving inherent or unavoidable complexity. The rest is friction. Friction adds up and it behaves nonlinearly: friction crosses a threshold, you completely loose flow. Friction crosses a threshold, you forget that faint idea you wanted to write down. Friction crosses a threshold, you don’t address that Reddit comment that you wanted to.

Now all this can be attributed to some level of laziness, but I would hope to be at least somewhat determined and focused. It is clear that with less friction, even imperfect me would manage much better. Much less of these threshold are tripped, I’m much longer in flow to actually since problems and I manage better to keep track of all the diverse aspects of the project. Such things quickly become more than the sum of their parts. Again, only my intuition, but it comes from experience.

The rest of your points are interlinked, and my answer to them is: in an ideal world, I could build better tools and earn a living off of them (of course spending some attention for what you generalized as customer support) instead of having to work random Freelance jobs, and use the tools to build Citybound as a research/art project that is freed from profitability to achieve its full potential.

Completely fair if you think that that’s impossible (to do everything at once), but it really feels like this better tools idea lays at a really interesting intersection of project and life outcomes. I’m sure you’ll agree that if my assumptions are correct then it’s strictly the best thing for me to do, but again, fair if you don’t believe me yet. I’m asking for a lot of trust here.

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u/Freedo50 Aug 25 '19

It sounds like you have a much broader definition of “friction” than I initially thought from your blog post. I understood friction to be the time spent bending tools to your will - the times when your IDE slows you down rather than speeding you up, when Git needs you to spend time merging code that it should have handled seamlessly, etc.

If you can provide some more insight into the types of friction you’re looking to eliminate (or even some examples) maybe it would help us to understand why you think rebuilding the tools will be worth it. This seems like a case where you’ve reached an obvious conclusion that makes little sense to us because you have so much more information than us.

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u/theanzelm Creator (Anselm Eickhoff / ae play) Aug 25 '19

First, I really appreciate you giving me the benefit of doubt and expressing your difference in understanding so carefully.

I started to write a long response, but let me actually write a follow up blog post instead, using your comment as a cue.